Guest editorial

Citation

Kumar, U., Parida, A. and Duffuaa, S.O. (2013), "Guest editorial", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jqme.2013.15419caa.001

Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Volume 19, Issue 3.

Developing and using key performance indicators to deploy strategy and improve performance is one of the most critical requirements for the managers and engineers in the industry today. Indicators are central to the performance of operation and maintenance in reporting, decision making, strategy implementation, and performance improvement. The area of maintenance performance measurement (MPM) is new and emerging. This is more relevant for heavy and capital-intensive engineering industries. MPM and management rely on indicators to create positive organizational impacts for optimization of resources, clear accountability, alignment of efforts, efficient processes, benchmarking and enhanced future capabilities. These papers for the special issue on MPM are selected from the papers of First International Conference on Maintenance Performance Measurement and Management 2011, held in Luleå, Sweden.

The first paper, “Performance indicators and terminology for value driven maintenance (VDM)” is based on four maintenance value drivers and the formula of net present value (NPV) to calculate the value of different maintenance strategies. Standardized indicators have been critically analyzed to find the most essential indicators for the four value drivers and for estimation of the NPV. A comprehensive description and classification of performance killers and drivers, and of indicators for VDM are presented in this paper.

Second paper, “Maintenance performance metrics: a state of the art review” provides an overview of research and developments in the measurement of maintenance performance. The authors consider the problems of various measuring parameters, with a focus to determine how value can be created for organizations by measuring maintenance performance. The paper looks into various frameworks or models that can be used to evaluate different maintenance strategies and determine the value of these frameworks for an organization.

The paper “Intelligent performance measures for condition-based maintenance,” develop a comprehensive approach to efficiently integrate maintenance and operation by combining process and condition monitoring data with performance measures. The data analysis resulting nonlinear scaling functions has been suggested to handle performance measures used for management in the same scale as intelligent condition and stress indices.

The fourth paper, “A maintenance maturity assessment method for the manufacturing industry,” proposes a maturity assessment method to measure the state of maintenance practices in a company. The method assumes that a maintenance department is evaluated in terms of its managerial, organizational, and technological capabilities. With this method, it is possible to analyze the maturity level reached by a company, in order to classify the criticalities in its maintenance processes; besides the company can also make a benchmark with the best companies.

The paper on risk-based dependability approach to MPM, describes how a risk-based dependability approach can be used to link MPM and management to overall objectives within an organization. The applied study deals with a case study at Trafikverket (the Swedish Transport Administration) with collection of qualitative data through interviews, workshops, and document studies, while quantitative data were collected from the databases.

The sixth paper, “Modeling costs in maintenance networks,” can be seen as a group of activities with which industrial assets are kept in operative condition, with an objective. The maintenance of three different equipment processes are examined in the network through a case study to get more specific information from real-world situations to develop the first version of the model, from each member of the network. The key results of the paper concern the cost items that should be considered in the model, the structure of the model, and how the general cost model. The cost model can be used in various performance measurement and decision-making situations, like maintenance service pricing, contract negotiations, outsourcing decisions, and life-cycle cost management.

We hope that this special issue on MPM will be liked and found to be interesting for the professionals from academia and industry.

Uday Kumar, Aditya Parida and Salih O Duffuaa